Community engagement

We are City Hall's Community Engagement team, and our mission is to bridge the gap between City Hall and London's communities. Our team works on giving communities a platform to be seen, heard, resourced, and to be more actively engaged in the City’s decision making. 

Storytelling is a strong theme in our work: every Londoner’s story matters, and every community should have a voice in City Hall and an opportunity to shape the future of London. We champion community-led action in London and work with Civil Society, community, faith and voluntary groups to improve Londoners’ lives.

Future of Participation

From Friday 7 to Thursday 13 July 2023, the GLA Community Engagement Team hosted a weeklong series of conversations, challenges, and thought provocations to help us explore how we think about and ‘do’ participation in policymaking, both online and in person across London.

We know our city is still grappling with the aftermath of a global pandemic, facing a pressing cost-of-living crisis, and contending with challenges to democratic participation, such as the introduction of voter IDs. We also know certain communities are disproportionately impacted by existing and deep-rooted inequalities.

Our ambition was to convene inclusive learning spaces where community voices are amplified, where connections between individuals and organisations can happen and help break down barriers to meaningful participation. 

We know together, we can shape the future we envision and build a city, a London, where every voice is heard and truly matters.

What we achieved

The six-day exploration saw over 1300 people register to take part in dialogue between Londoners, organisations who support them and the Mayor of London’s policy teams. We would like to thank everyone involved in making the week such a success.

We will be sharing the slides, recordings and summaries across the 14 sessions on our website soon. We are also developing a learning guide which will collate the insights from the events which will be ready to share later in the year.

London Engagement Collaborative 

The LEC is a pan-London, cross-sector group for anyone interested in working together to involve communities in the work to make London a safer, greener, and more prosperous city for all Londoners. 

It is run through a partnership between the GLA’s Community Engagement Team, Koreo, Migrants in Culture, and International Futures Forum. We recognise that to better embed community voices in decision making, we need to have open and honest conversations about how we engage with communities across the city. 

COVID-19 has had a deep but unequal impact on Londoners, increasing existing and interconnected inequalities. A huge amount of engagement and collaboration was carried out by all sectors in London to ease the impact of the pandemic. The London Engagement Collaborative wants to learn from the successes and challenges in engaging communities in these responses on order to: 

• centre community experience and expertise in policy making and implementation 

• build strong relationships and support collaborative working 

• share resources and build collective learning. 

If you would like to find out more and/or would like to be involved, please email [email protected]. 

To ensure that these upcoming conversations/future network meetings and workshops are accessible please let us know if you have any accessibility needs which might be a barrier to your involvement. 

We want to make sure that the LEC is representative of the organisations that work to support Londoners so please do feel free to share this invite with your networks and encourage others to get involved. 

Civic Futures Programme 

Civic Futures is a fellowship facilitated by Koreo, Dark Matter Labs and The Young Foundation, in partnership with the Greater London Authority (GLA).

We are currently working with 30 people for 15 months (September 2022 - March 2023) from across London’s civil society and local government to facilitate collective learning and discovery focused on peer connection, exploration and inquiry, systems thinking, and collaboration, in order to deepen connections across the civic system, and create spaces to explore alternative and emerging futures together. 

You can learn more about our work to support Civil Society organisations and the sector in London on our Civil Society pages. 

This includes a Community Grant Funding page where you will find grants that are currently open and available soon to support communities and Civil Society organisations.